Mr. W. H. Mallock on Socialism

NO WRITER ATTRIBUTED
February 21, 1907

Mr. W. H. Mallock, A.M., delivered the first of his series of lectures on "Socialism and the Allied Social and Economic Questions" in Emerson Hall yesterday evening. The second lecture will be delivered this evening at 8 o'clock in the same place.

Socialism, said Mr. Mallock, is still a theory, although it is often spoken of as existing and spreading. There has never been an actual condition of socialism, the nearest approaches having been co-operative organizations dependent on the ordinary means of production for their materials. When these have succeeded, they have gradually dropped their socialistic features, and have become ordinary individualistic organizations. Consistent socialism can not depend on private capitalism, but must supplant it.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, socialism was Utopian, and therefore ineffective, but in the middle of the century Karl Marx gave it what was supposed to be a foundation in actual science. The formula of Marx is that all wealth is due to labor, and therefore all wealth is due to the laborers. His scheme was to have the product of an hour of labor exchange for the product of an hour's labor in any other employment.